Time To Adapt Your Open Source Software Policies To Include AI Code Assistants' Output!

To safely use AI code assistants, businesses developing software will need to vet the output of these code assistants using the same quality assurance mechanisms and policies adopted for freely available Open Source Software (OSS).

The use of Generative AI tools (GAI) – tools that are able to take simple prompts and use them to produce seemingly useful content, such as text, images or audio, has been, and still is, on the rise because of the purported efficiency and productivity gains. Many of these tools are also freely available for businesses to use - making their adoption both functionally and financially attractive.

One category of GAI that is particularly interesting to businesses developing software is AI code assistants which have the ability to generate or auto-complete source code based on a high level description of what is desired (i.e. the prompts) and that take into account context, such as function and variable names, arguments required, other open